


a little too early, a little too late

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: AOS Advent, F/M, Season/Series 02, Season/Series 05, Time Travel, past Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 09:21:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12908979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: Fitz is marveling, his feet anchored to the floor because for the first time in one year, eight months, and eleven days Daisy’s here.





	a little too early, a little too late

**Author's Note:**

> Written for AOS Advent's day 3 prompt: renewal and has BIG SPOILERS for the season 5 premiere, so if you haven't seen it, don't read this.

There’s a very limited amount of time to play with here (and the irony of that is not lost of Fitz). The truth is that anything he does here could be the thing that tips the scales, changes the future, unwrites his past. And when that happens, he’s … he doesn’t know. All he’s got right now is a whole lot of theory and the plan: the words he needs to say, the warnings and instructions he needs to pass on before time runs out. He’s thought of every variable. Except himself.

“You’re not real,” he says—the other him, the younger him. He watches himself shake, struggle to move, to react, to _think_. He remembers this. There are still echoes of it—not every day still but sometimes he’ll stop and have to remember how to make his fingers do what he wants, how to get them to move just right—but this was the worst time. He doesn’t miss it.

(He’s sorry he couldn’t spare himself this, but his options were limited and there was too much chance of making the uprising _worse_ to risk it.)

“Listen-” he says, trying to calm himself down.

“No! You stay back!”

He holds his ground, grits his teeth. They don’t have _time_ for this.

“Fitz?” A door opens. Daisy. “Are you- holy shit. _What did you do?_ ”

Fitz is marveling, his feet anchored to the floor because for the first time in one year, eight months, and eleven days Daisy’s here. His younger self isn’t so affected.

“Skye! Run! Get May!” He tries to protect her. Of course he does, Fitz thinks, because he’s always been a bloody idiot. And that’s his last thought before his younger self rams into him and he’s thinking _oh god_ and _please no_ because there are some very specific theories as to what would happen if two of the same individual were to come into contact. And then there’s relief, a brief flash of it because he hits the ground and he’s alive, they both are, then he feels the impact of a punch to his cheek, thinks, _skin contact_ , and that’s that isn’t it?

 

 

 

Fitz is on the ground. His vision’s a blur and a big black spot keeps hovering in the middle there when he blinks and he feels tears on his cheeks where hands are touching him.

“Fitz? _Fitz!_ Come on, talk to me. Tell me you’re okay.”

DaiSkye. The two thoughts slam together in his mind. All at once he knows two divergent sets of facts. This is Skye, who’s been with him for months, who’s held him when he cried the night Simmons left, who’s his one last true friend. This is Daisy, who’s an Inhuman, who’s been lost to the future, who _doesn’t exist yet_. That woman is not this woman, not yet. Not _ever_. He’s gonna fix it. That’s why he came back in time.

Which is weird because he also didn’t. He has very distinct memories of working all night on the machine before leaving first thing at dawn and also memories of sleeping in late and eating Cocoa Puffs at eleven before wandering down to storage.

“Fitz? You with me?”

He’s sitting up now. When did that happen? “Yeah,” he says. It’s easier. His tongue and his throat are still stiff, but his mind remembers how to fight this battle. “Yeah, I’m here.”

“Good. And—don’t take this the wrong way or anything—but did you just make that guy disappear? And also was it my imagination or did he look just like you only way more Hunger Games?”

“Yeah,” he says slowly, his mind still whirling.

“Yeah it was my imagination? Or yeah you made him disappear?”

He finally looks at her— _really_ looks at her—and … it’s _Daisy_. He hugs her. Until she hugs him back and his muscles ache and he can feel the flutter of sobs welling in his throat. It’s silly when he just saw her twenty minutes ago. But it’s not when he can still remember that last, quick brush of her fingertips along his shoulders while she passed him by on her way back from the bathroom. It was nothing, not even a hello, but for more than a year now it’s been the last bit of her he’s had. Just like the smile Jemma gave him around a bite of eggs and the hair ruffle from Mack and the nod from Coulson… He’s held them all like treasures in a box in his heart, secretly afraid he’d never get anymore. But now she’s here.

She waits him out, lets him be the one to pull back. And that’s just so Daisy. He’s missed her.

“Sorry,” he says, wiping at his cheeks. They’re wet and so is her shirt.

“’S okay,” she says with a half-shrug.

He takes a deep breath. “He did look like me,” he says. “Because he was me. From the future.”

Daisy stares for eight solid seconds (he counts) before saying, “Ooooooh-kay.” (The _oh_ lasts for another three.)

“I came back to-”

“You mean he came back,” she cuts in.

He hesitates, unsure how to explain that he is and he isn’t himself. Hell, he’s having some trouble understanding it and he’s the one it’s happening to.

Daisy’s head drops forward, her hair obscuring her face momentarily before she pops back up. “Is this a drinking kind of conversation?”

“Probably.”

“Oh hell,” she mutters.

 

 

 

Skye was right. It was _definitely_ a drinking conversation. She’s slightly buzzed—but still 100% capable of following (sadly, so so sadly, she does not want to know these things)—and listening to Fitz tell her about the _actual demon_. (Not to be confused with the wannabe devil from another planet but actually from this planet he’s just been gone for ten thousand years and ohmy _gosh_ Skye does not want to see this future.) And that stuff’s not even _why_ Fitz came back in time! Those are just the things he’s mentioned in passing to explain the _actual reason_.

“Are you gonna be okay?” he asks.

“I might throw up.” She’s facedown on the table and her voice echoes all weirdly around her head. The beer bottle in her hand wiggles. She tugs it right back. “ _Not_ because of the beer.”

“Right.” He waits a few seconds. “But really are you-”

She pops back up. “So the world’s gonna be destroyed and some aliens sent us to the future to learn how so we could stop it only that cemented that future, so instead you came _back_ in time because that _doesn’t_ cement the future somehow?”

He wavers a hand in the air. “There’s more quantum physics to it than that, but basically yes.”

“And you’re future Fitz and also my Fitz all squished together?”

His face goes weird in a way she can’t put words to. “Yes.”

“Okay. Okay.” She says it again a few more times. She rests her palms against the edge of the table, splays her fingers. It gives her something here and real to focus on. “So what’s the plan?”

Fitz—and she cannot _believe_ this—shrugs. Just shrugs! Like he has no idea!

“I thought I was going to tell you guys what not to do and then wink out of existence. I didn’t think I’d be stuck here.”

Her forehead drops to the table again. God, geniuses are such idiots sometimes.

 

 

 

They tell Coulson and May because duh. And Trip because he’s known Fitz long enough now to notice how _different_ he is. No one tells the psycho in the basement. And Simmons… Fitz isn’t surprised when they find out she’s undercover. But then why would he be? He’s lived through this already.

She wonders if it hurt before, if he spent that night crying in her arms the way he did so many months ago. But this Fitz isn’t that Fitz. He’s someone new, someone older, someone different.

He touches her more. Little things like a hand on her shoulder or her back. And he climbs in bed with her the way he did those first few weeks after Simmons left. It’s nothing sexual. She just listens to him talk and he holds her. She thinks he’s afraid to be alone after all the time he spent trying to bring the rest of them back.

And then Simmons is back. Safe and sound, looking super cute with her short hair, and Skye’s missed her— _so much—_ but like everybody else she backs off when Simmons turns for the lab. It’s been a long day what with Raina and her dad and all, she hits the hay.

Only to be woken up twenty minutes later by a very grouchy engineer. “Shove over,” he orders. She does (what else is she gonna do, tell him to get out?) and he flops down next to her, dragging at her covers.

“Shouldn’t you be with Simmons?” she asks.

“Nah. She just got back. She doesn’t need to worry over me.”

Her fingers curl over the edge of the blanket. Her chin brushes his shoulder. “Did you avoid her before?”

“Yeah. For months.”

She can see that. The way he was before, how bad her leaving hurt him, he would’ve been scared of getting burned again. But they would’ve made it through; they _did_ , and now he’s wasting time in here with her. “Right. So that’s why? You’re preserving the timeline?”

She winces at how short her tone is, how _get the hell out_ the words sound. He stares at her for a long time.

“No,” he says, “that’s not why.”

“Are you afraid she’ll figure it out?” She fingers the frayed edging on her comforter. “Aren’t you gonna tell her?”

“Of course.”

“Just not tonight.”

“Right.” He’s twisted over onto his side to face her, his face all scrunched up so he looks older than he is, more his real age.

“Because it’s late and she’s sure to be tired.”

“Exactly.”

“And it’s a lot to take in. The end of the world, time travel, true love.”

“Yeah, it’s- Wait, what?”

She waits. She said it once, she won’t say it again.

And when did she get like this? When did she get _angry_? Not at Hydra or at Ward but at her two best friends for loving each other when she’s always known that’s how it is?

It’s this other Fitz that’s done it. He’s not her brother the way the other was, he doesn’t need her protection. And sometimes—not all the time but _some_ times—when he holds her she just feels … wanted. It’s a good feeling. And now Simmons is back and she’ll be the one he goes to late at night.

“I never told you Jemma and I were in love.”

She laughs, rolls onto her back—or tries, she’s so close to the wall she ends up at an angle—so she doesn’t have to look at him. “You didn’t have to. You came what? Three years back in time?”

“Closer to four.”

“Closer to four! And you expect me to believe you and Simmons didn’t get together by then? Really?”

“Skye-”

“So tomorrow you’ll tell her everything and the awkwardness will be gone and it’ll be happily ever after.” She should really not sound so bitter about that.

“Skye.”

“What?”

“I’m not in love with Simmons.”

Her head whips around so fast she feels something crack.

“I’m in love with _my_ Jemma,” he says. “But that’s not who came back tonight.”

“But you loved her before.”

He nods. “Yeah. But I’m not that guy.”

She could laugh; wasn’t she _just_ thinking that? “So you’ll wait. Until she’s the Simmons you love.”

He shakes his head. “Nah. Because by then I won’t be me. I’m not sure I even am now.”

She wants to ask him what the hell _that’s_ supposed to mean, but the breath goes out of her lungs when she feels his fingers around hers. Somewhere along the line her hand ended up on top of the blankets with him and it’s not like he’s never held her hand before—hell, he’s spooned her in this very bed a few times—but all of that was pretty definitely _platonic_. This isn’t.

Or she thinks it’s not. He’s confusing, this time-traveling, world-saving version of Fitz. The anger seeps out of her. She doesn’t hate being confused.

She turns her back on him, nuzzling up against him. His chin rests on her shoulder, his breath stirs her hair, and all through the night his fingers stay twined with hers. The future is looking a lot more promising.

 


End file.
